In today's work environment, many workers are splitting time between working at home and in the office. Although working at home can be convenient, there are problems associated with such an arrangement. Notably, when a person works from home, they are not available at the work site to answer his/her phone. Typically, a person working from home must call the work site to retrieve messages. While a person may check for messages several times throughout the day, there are situations that demand immediate attention and for which any delay, such as the lag time between when a message is received and when a person checks messages, is unacceptable. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system that allows a person to receive calls at home that were originally directed to his/her business phone.
An employee that works from home must contend with the additional complication of insuring that the employer is billed for work-related calls that are made from the home phone. This complication can sometimes be resolved by charging business calls made from the home to business issued calling cards and credit cards. This method of payment, however, can become more tiresome especially when the employee makes numerous calls. Another solution has been to have the employer reimburse the employee. The reimbursement process, however, is typically time consuming and inconvenient for the employee. Thus, there has been no truly convenient solution proposed to deal with billing of work related calls made from the home.
In recent years, a number of new telephone service features have been provided by an AIN. The AIN evolved out of a need to increase the capabilities of the telephone network architecture in order to meet the growing needs of telephone customers or users. The AIN architecture generally comprises two networks, a data-messaging network and a trunked communications network. The trunked communications network handles voice and data communications between dispersed network locations, whereas the data messaging network is provided for controlling operations of the trunked communications network.
While prior telephone systems have addressed numerous shortcomings in the art, these systems have failed to create the situation wherein working at home is functionally transparent to both the business and the worker. Specifically, prior systems have failed to provide for forwarding of calls originally directed to the business phone to the home and simultaneously billing calls placed from the home to the work number. Such a system would be highly desirable for both businesses and workers. The present invention is directed to such a solution.